BEFORE YOU INSTALL WORD 2013 or 365, Migrate your Word template to 2013!

If you have been using Word and have customized your template (Normal.dot or Normal.dotm ie, with macros or macro buttons, styles etc) it may be necessary that you migrate your template to 2013 BEFORE installation. It should be possible to do it retrospectively (ie, after installation) but how is not clear. So open Knowledge Base article 2790616 and follow the instructions.

These are clear enough, but the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\W ord\Options may be missing the last two items. These are easy to create, and then the DWORD Key MigrateNormalOnFirstBoot which needs to be set to 1. The article refers to Word 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Once you have set up your 2013 template as you want, you can export customizations (click right on the ribbon, Customize the Ribbon then Export to your backup location). That way if the customizations are lost (as happened to me with my created macro buttons), you can reinstate them easily.

Later: JMG commented later that simply copying your old Normal.dotm into your templates directory would achieve the same result. So far it looks as if this is correct, but am in discussion with MS about it.

That depends. If you have no styles, macros or user-created icons, there is no need to migrate Normal.dotm, because it doesn't have anything useful in it. However, if recreating your dotm file from scratch would take you time, it would be worth migrating it. I actually originally migrated my Normal.dot from Word 2003 to 2007, and all 70 or so toolbar icons and macros came across into the ADD-INS ribbon, complete with their created macro-buttons. These have also migrated ok to 2010 and now to 2013. I guess you can still export customizations from Word 2010 and import them into 2013 which would give you your 2010 ribbon or quick access toolbar, however, I haven't checked this yet. Maybe someone could try it and let us know what comes across.

The issue, then, is primarily one of preserving toolbars , keyboard shortcuts, AutoText entries, and standard styles that live in the Normal template. The templates that concern me, which contain VBA event procedures, such as Document_New and Document_Open, are probably OK.

For Word 2010 Normal templates, it's enough to rename it before installing 2013. Then after the installation, rename the new Word 2013 created Normal.dotm to something else and rename your original one back to Normal.dotm. Not sure if it works on earlier versions and plain .dot templates. Don't see why not --Word should convert them.

I agree JMG, that should work and has in the past. BUT MS seem keen for you to migrate your template. If it is only a question of renaming, they should say that as it would save playing around in the registry. Anyway, there is nothing to lose in creating the registry entry, apart from about 3 minutes of time. However, to test your theory, I renamed Normal.dotm, and copied my 2010 template from a backup. I changed the registry entry to 0 and rebooted Word. No problem, brought all customizations in. I have rung MS and they say they will review and update the KB article if necessary.